Misalignment of Art

Freeway
21

some tips

  • using Freeway is a whole different way of doing things.

  • placing independent html boxes on a page and hoping that they always line up on web pages is a recipe for problems. If the text in one gets bigger in a particular browser it will shift downwards over the top of something below, if layered, or push the one below down. The extent of the shifting depends on how much text is above the lower elements. If all dimensions could be specified in ems then there would be no problem but this is not possible with Freeway at the moment.

  • if you do want two html boxes to be associated in some way, eg to line up at the top, right, or left, put them inside another html box and align each of to the top (or right or left) of that box. It’s important to get the idea of nesting html boxes as a way of associating one box with another. It’s easier to visualise the nesting if you show items on the left (not just pages). If nesting is done properly, then things inside containers will retain their association.

  • I totally agree that the big X is stupid and unhelpful, I’ve said so many times on this list. The worst situation is if one box at the top encroaches on one below, and there are lots more below that, in which case the entire page suddenly degerates into a mass of X’s with no idea what’s inside any of them. It’s then nearly impossible to resolve if undo won’t work. Instead Freeway should just display the overlapping problem, indicating which item won’t be output, perhaps with an X, but while still showing the contents of the box as usual. If two things overlap, Freeway should NOT extend one below the bottom of the other as it does now. Most experienced users like me have come to ‘live with’ this weirdness but I still reckon it is the most stupid thing I’ve seen in a piece of software.

  • Another hint is to try, as much as possible, to do everything inside one html box. If you do want horizontally aligned elements across that box, put an inline html box at the point you want, one that goes right across the page, and other little boxes inside this for whatever you want to go there. All the little boxes will then stay in correct alignment.

The key to it all is to not just have html boxes willy-nilly all over the page and expect things to remain solid. That just won’t happen, especially if the font size used in the page is changed by the user.

Hope this helps,

Chris.

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22

Thank you, Chris.

I’m going to be very conscious and try to nestle html items in the future.

Rebecca

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23

I think however that the best idea for horizontal groupings of text is to use inline tables, some extended settings, and the remove dimensions action.

Use the action to set the table width to 100% of the enclosing div, and to clear td width and heights.

Use extended attributes on selected cells to set the column widths for those columns in %, not pixels.

Type whatever you like in the cells; text can be vertically centred easily, cell colours can be different, etc.

The end result will be a set of cells that always remain horizontally and vertically grouped and aligned, yet stretch horizontally with the page and vertically with changes in font size. The height of the text in the biggest cell will control height of all cells in that row (nice).

Achieving the same result with html boxes is just about impossible.

This is a great way to nicely make stretchy footers or any horizontally aligned group of elements across any page or any html item on a page.

Good luck,

Chris.

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24

Using tables sounds like a good solution for some of these layouts and footers, but I have avoided using them because I had heard (and read) that tables are not search engine friendly, and that they can hinder the spiders crawling about.
The current site I am working on is dependent on being picked up by the spiders since it is a new product for feline leukemia and feline FIV (aids) infections.

Several of the pages with a column of long vertical text and multiple images to the side have been a royal %$*! problem with alignment issues. Is Freeway’s table structure different, or would I be compromising the searchability of the site by using tables?

Rebecca

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25

Sometime around 31/3/08 (at 15:20 -0400) rebeccafonseca said:

Using tables sounds like a good solution for some of these layouts
and footers, but I have avoided using them because I had heard (and
read) that tables are not search engine friendly, and that they can
hinder the spiders crawling about.

That’s not actually true at the basic level. It is possible to use
CSS-positioned content to control the order in which spiders find
text as they read a page, separately from the visual display order,
whereas table-based structures don’t give you the same kind of
freedom.

It is also true that tables used for general layout tasks can make
pages less accessible. But just as table layouts don’t pose specific
problems for spiders, it isn’t automatically true that table layouts
will automatically make your page not accessible.

If you’re having major frustrations with alignment then tables will
definitely help. And if you avoid getting tricksy with this, just
keeping the basic table structure for this layout control task, then
you won’t harm your search engine performance OR make the page
specifically inaccessible at all.

k

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26

I very much doubt that having things in tables would make any difference at all. There are lots of other much more important factors involved.

If your page is layered (blue layer button on) then the only things in tables will be the single table layer you’re using to line things up.

Spiders can easily traverse tables; I wouldn’t worry about that at all.

As Keith says, use divs unless there’s a special reason to use tables - these days only to maintain alignment of disparate elements of a layout. But if you do want to use a table, go for it. To get the most out of tables, learn how to apply extended attributes to cells or tables, because then you can control every aspect of the way it turns out.

Chris.
Chris.

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